One thing which is connected to academic publication is the language used by academic scholars. Through academic language or ‘discourse’, they form their shared identity by drawing on the cultural reservoir to build up their individual repertoire through the process of affiliation and individuation. Based on the interviews with three professors, two aspects are explored in relation to this issue: (a) their attitude towards academic language as cultural reservoir and affiliation and (b) their personal use of academic language as their individual repertoire and individuation.
4.2.1. Attitude towards Academic Language
All three professor participants seem to contend that they are comfortable using academic language in their publication. Professor Wonnicott claims that he had ‘extensive training’ as a postgraduate student regarding a written style and he practiced a lot as well as learned from the comments received.
Professor Bracton says that her A-Level Latin courses provided her with the foundation for unambiguous language structure, which is mainly used by lawyers and in her academic law discipline:
… in Latin, you have one main verb clause at the end and everything else is subclauses. So it’s: ‘Having inspected the army, and having checked the river bridge is intact, and having done this and having done that, and once he realized there was a problem with the provisions but making sure that this wasn’t solved first, Caesar invaded Gaul.’ That’s legal structure. You see what I mean? Because that is the way you are absolutely unambiguous. You have a main verb at the end; ‘That would be an offence if, if it’s a Monday and if you didn’t do it on purpose, well, on the
other hand, subject to this sort of thing….’ So, there are lots of subordinate clauses. And so, when I read statute, Acts of Parliament, or judicial decisions or court judgments, they’re expressed like that, it was obvious to me because I was used to it. (Professor Bracton)
Although Professor Bracton feels comfortable with academic language in her discipline because of its unambiguity and clear structure, she finds that other disciplines are written with complicated language, especially English literature and sociology, and she believes that those disciplines value complication over simplicity and understanding:
If I read publications in English literature, I think, ‘Why do they write in this foreign language? Why do they not want me to understand what they’re saying?’ I don’t get it. It’s the same with sociology, why don’t they just say what they mean. Mm, so there’s no, for lawyers, there’s no value in complication for its own sake. I’m not succeeding if people say ‘I don’t understand what they say.’ (Professor Bracton)
However, Professor Woodworth believes that the language used in law is not homogeneous, distinguishing between writing in practice (as used by lawyers) and writing for publication (as used by academics in law). She suggests that academic writing offer ‘more scope for expression’:
Writing in practice is very tightly controlled, you have to be very careful, not that you don’t have to be careful in academic writing, but you’ve got much more scope for expression, I think, in academic writing. But writing in practice, you have to be very very careful about the correct choice of words, about how you express things. In academic writing you need to be accurate but you can also be colourful but you need to keep control. (Professor Woodworth)
These accounts suggest that the professor participants have formed a shared identity with their community by affiliating themselves with the language use within each discipline. Although they suggest that each field of writing might value different kinds of language use, their attitude towards the language used in their academic field is quite positive.
4.2.2. Personal Use of Academic Language
As all three professor participants feel comfortable using academic language in their writing, they recount how they establish their repertoire of language use in academic publication.
Professor Woodworth says that there was a big learning curve for her at the beginning of her academic career when she switched from the language used as a lawyer towards the language used as an academic. What she gained through her use of academic language was her control of the language to express the ideas in her academic publication.
It’s playing with language and it’s playing with ideas in your use of the language. And so, that’s exactly what it is. It’s having academic experience to have the ideas and the knowledge to have the ideas and then it’s control of the language to be able to play with it in order to express the ideas in ways that attracts your audience, your reader. (Professor Woodworth)
Professor Wonnicott claims that since he started to publish, i.e. during his doctoral degree, his style of writing does not change enormously. His language has been ‘fairly clear’ and ‘recognisable fairly quickly’ by his rhythmical pattern and wording:
I think it’s the cadence and the phraseology. I would try and write so that it reads easily. So, even when I’m writing about a very difficult subject, I try and write it so that people who are not expert can understand it. (Professor Wonnicott)
As for Professor Bracton, it seems that her repertoire of language use follows the traditional writing in law, namely, the clarity of the sentence through no use of commas:
I write like that without commas most of the time as many lawyers do because that’s the style in which we express the law. To be as clear as possible. And my husband says I talk like that. Unstoppable because I haven’t got any verb yet. ‘Wait. Wait.’ [laughs] So, what I’m saying is that I think if you’ve done that, that’s a not such a huge leap. For others, there may be more of a leap. They want to write choppy sentences, which actually make it far from being clear. (Professor Bracton)
Based on these accounts, the professor participants suggest that by drawing on their cultural reservoir of academic language, they have built up their individual repertoire in their written publication with word play for a colourful expression, cadence for readability and no comma for clarity.